How will history see Lee Kuan Yew?

Perhaps only his late wife Kwa Geok Choo understood what was behind that iconic public face that at one hour could be so gruff and cold and intimidating — and two hours later so charming and gracious and reasonable. I told him I marveled at how well Singaporeans understood him, but he shook his head and snapped back: "They think they know me, but they only know the public me."

I tried — probing him with annoying questions. Once asked whether there was anyone alive who was like him, he answered without apology: "I do not know of any person who is most like me." He may very well be right, but if so, that helps make my case for awarding him hedgehog honors despite everything.

Sure, I'm stubborn about this, but let us note that in one conversation he summoned up the notable figure of Jean Monnet (1888-1979), whom history reveres for his prophetic vision of European unity, by way of a Common Market and a European Union. For this one singular contribution, Monnet gets marked as a political hedgehog. So how is the Lee Kuan Yew a modern Monnet, as I suspect history will say?

We will require more time to helicopter upward for the illuminating panoramic view. But in my mind with each year in power he grew into a composite figure, a dual icon of sorts where a modern-day Plato (glowing with the vision of an ideal city-state run solely by the virtuous) fused with a modern-day Machiavelli (coldly calculating strategies to keep the "soft-headed" utopian vision from getting its head chopped off).

To govern in these fraught times, you need to be both. The political hedgehog in effect must have two sides to his political being. As Machiavelli insisted, it was best if the leader was both feared and loved. Because Lee Kuan Yew had it all, he became a political giant of his time.

The author, a distinguished scholar of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, has penned the book is the book, Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, in the Giants of Asia book series.